I suppose we all have our obsessive-compulsive areas.  One of mine is visual balance.  I have been trying to analyze this, but I’m not really getting anywhere.  Like art, I may not know what makes it good or bad, but I know what I like :)

I had thought, at first, that it had to do with numbers.  I tend to like odd numbers because they have a specific mid-point around which everything else is arranged - like the hub of a wheel.  There’s a center kind of holding everything together.  That doesn’t happen with even numbers.

Take 7 for example:

1…2…3…4...5…6…7

4 is the clear center here, with as many numbers following it as preceding it.

Now look at 8

1…2…3…4...5…6…7…8

The center of this sequence falls between 4 and 5.  But there’s nothing there.*  Yeats would understand this instinctively :)  The center cannot hold, because there is no center!

This is balanced.

This (which is how the stitch pattern is written) isn’t.

I was tempted, at first, to think of this purely in terms of numbers.  Odd numbers balance and even numbers don’t.  But, of course, as soon as I formulated that theory, the following popped into my head…

This only has two parts.  I suppose you could say that it has four parts if you count the dots as separate items - but in either case you’re dealing with an even number.  And yet this balances perfectly.  There is no impulse in the viewer to either add or subtract anything or to adjust it in any way - it is perfect as it is.

So I put it to you - what makes for visual balance in your eyes?

The next hat is under way…

This is the Coraline that I dyed a few days ago.  It’s really too bright for a whole hat (for anyone over the age of six) but it will do nicely for the central panel with darker or more muted shades filling in at the top and bottom.

And please note that it is “balanced”, though it’s the garter stitch that carries the day, not the cables :)

Myria is mightily pleased with her new monitor which she occasionally refers to as “concentrated L33T sauce”.  I take this to mean that it’s good :)  Unfortunately, Jade seems to like it too - likes to sit behind it which drives Myria crazy…

...because Jade is one of the universe’s clumsiest creatures.  See all those tchotchkes on the monitor stand?  Whenever Jade…uh…dismounts, she attempts to take several of them along with her.  In our house, the fog doesn’t come in on little cat feet.  It galumphs in wearing spiked clodhoppers and dragging broken bits of everything it has passed on the way behind it :)

* Yes, there’s an infinty of values there if we’re talking about the number line.  But we’re not :)

There’s a new color over at The Dye Pot.  As well as the color itself, it is named for the book (and now film) of one of my favorite writers - Neil Gaiman.  It’s called Coraline.

One of the issues I’m running into with the Do-it-Yourself Hat is this.  Just because I can make it up I go along, doesn’t mean I have to.  My own psychological make-up seems to mean that I go one way or the other with little or no middle ground.  Regarding these hats, that works out to mean either I come up with something new every time or feel mildly guilty about using a design or design element more than once.

Let’s just say that I know that’s pretty silly and that I am trying to remind myself that re-using a design element means that the element is successful - not that I’m lazy or unimaginative :)

The other side to this is that when I run across something I really like, I’m often tempted to write it down, capture and trap it into a much more regulation type of format - a pattern, in other words.  And this impulse slightly dismays me too because I do not want to spell things out where this pattern is concerned.  The whole idea in the first place was to set up a few general guidelines (and the fewer the better) so that anyone could plug in their own ideas and come up with anything at all.

All of that aside, the hat that fell off my needles this week pleased and greatly surprised me - probably because I almost frogged it a dozen times :)

The central panel is a pair of opposed twist six-stitch cables with a bobble between them done on the same row on which the cables are twisted.

I lovelovelove the look of cables turned on their sides - talk about a fresh perspective!  I mean, after a few seconds, it’s obvious what the trick is but when you first look at it, it looks like something wholly other.  There’s something almost architecturally satisfying in this and these sideways cable panels remind me of mouldings and Victorian gingerbread :)

Then I decided I wanted more cables and, knowing that they would pull the fabric in seriously, realized that I would probably need to pick up quite a few more stitches than I would if I were just going to go with garter or seed or regular ribbing.  I wound up with 144 stitches on my circular.  Really, when I had counted all that out a couple of times I hit the first you-should-frog-this(YSFT) point.  I kept thinking that couldn’t be right and, really, that was way too many stitches.  However my fingers, as though they had little minds of their own, had already worked twice around the circumference and were embarking on the first round of cable twists - 24 of them around the body of the hat.  Up to this point, I had been uncertain about whether these cables were for the brim part of the hat or for the body and I think it was about here that I finally decided they were definitely for the body.

So I built cables for a while and then decided to terminate half of them as well as getting going on the decreases.  For the first set (the shorter ones in the picture) I wound up doing the cable twist, doing a K2tog twice on the next round (they’re four-stitch cables) and a final K2togB on the round after that.  I rather fancy that the truncated cable looks somewhat candle-like and I was quite pleased with the result.

I went on, doing an additional decrease buried in the purl stitches, until the remaining 12 cables were as long as I wanted them to be, and decreased them away as well.  This time, I did the 2 K2togs before I did the cable twist and followed that, as before, with a K2togB on the subsequent round.  It was easier to manage and produced a slightly different (but still pleasantly candle-like) look.

After purling a couple rounds, I went back to stockinette and a more standard decrease mode.  I debated about adding a top-knot or a pom-pom or a tassel.  But it seemed to me that the hat had enough going on with all the panel and body cables, so I skipped the upper-story decoration, and finished things up with simple K2, P2 ribbing on the other side.

I feared that the hat would be enormous (given the number of stitches in its upper section), suitable for smuggling basketballs perhaps, but not really for wearing.  To my surprise, it didn’t turn out that way.  The hat is a perfectly ordinary ladies size medium though it is a bit heavier and more solid than an ordinary beanie or watch cap.

Now, let’s see if I can come up with another one before next Tuesday :)

We’ve had a bit of a computer crisis here which is why I’m a bit late posting this week.  See, I managed to trash two computers Monday morning :(

My beloved old laptop was beginning to show geriatric signs and so we decided something needed to be done before it became an out and out emergency.  Myria moved to a desktop system some years ago, which left her Dell laptop free.  Since it was in good shape, it was decided that I would move my files and software to the Dell and shelve the old VAIO.  I did this over the course of the last couple of weeks, not hurrying because the VAIO was still running just fine - if a little noisily.

Monday morning, the transfer and set up of the Dell was finally completed with the installation of a cordless keyboard.  I was up and running and I put the VAIO away for what I thought would be the last time - barring emergencies.  About two hours later, the Dell blew its video display :(

This was troublesome, but I figured I still had the VAIO, so I dug it back out.  It wouldn’t even turn on.

We finally got things resolved this afternoon when Myria bought a new monitor for her desktop and hooked up her old monitor to the Dell laptop (which was otherwise just fine) for me.  Ahh, finally - I have access!

In the meantime, I’ve been knitting away.

This hat uses both the Wood color and the Cedars of Lebanon color (central band) which I spun off from Wood last week.  Until I saw the finished article, I continued to think of both tones as woody in nature.  When I finished the hat and sat back to take it in, I couldn’t think of anything but chocolate and caramel.  I finally had to remand it to the hallway - out of sight - pending delivery next week because it kept making me hungry :)

This one got a little more complex, with cables in the center band (yes, bobbles too) and cables in the top as well.  I fudged in a lot of stitches when picking them up around the band because of how much the cabling would pull the pattern in - but I think I overdid it a little :)  I really don’t want to frog it, so I’m trying to tell myself it’s an interesting experiment and surely someone else out there has a melon as big as mine!  Surely?  Shirley?  Eh…

I am having fun playing with the cables though.  Funny, I’ve been craving cable work for about a month now and really have been enjoying working them for the hat.  A few weeks ago, I even made a much-cabled swatch with the idea of (Shhh - don’t tell anybody!) maybe making a sweater.  The attempt didn’t go anywhere though because the yarn wasn’t up to the job.  So I will find a different yarn and make another attempt :)

In going through the stash, searching for hat-appropriate material (and playing with colors is also something I want to do with these chapeaux…) I discovered that I had two different bags of mohair - a fairly substantial amount and decided that, perhaps, another mohair blanket was in order.  It’s moving slowly because I’m obsessing over hats and cables, but it got under way a couple of nights ago.

Nothing fancy here, just a length of stockinette with garter stitch borders and a row of eyelets thrown in whenever the knitter thinks of it.  I have decided this will be worked a bit more densely than the original (more stockinette than lace) and on smaller needles.  For me, there is nothing to match the luxury and warmth of a mohair blanket.  That said, it seems entirely possible that in addition to the one I already have (which I have dragged with me everywhere), a back-up wouldn’t be out of the question at all :)  The colors I have are many and diverse so this will be a sort of patchwork, I guess. 

I succeeded in finding Easter Egg dye that I liked.  In addition to it being an acceptable price (for what is usually six tablets - red, orange, yellow, green, teal and purple), extra tablets and colors were included so I wound up with roughly twice the amount of dye I would normally have gotten!  And with new colors to play with too - whee!  I was especially pleased because I wound up not acquiring any E.E. dye at all last Easter - not that it slowed me down much :)

But, speaking of dying (we were, right?) I finally have something that’s old enough and has seen enough wear to give me an idea of how the E.E. dye wears over time.  I made Myria’s mitts out of one of the first yarns I ever dyed - Tea Rose.  The yarn was dyed in May 2006 and the mitts were made in July of that year.  During the cool and cold weather of the last two years, they have been in almost constant use - In fact I had to repair a couple of minor holes last week which is how I really noticed the color change.

The upper left side of the picture shows what the mitts’ color looks like these days.  The bottom right part of the image is what I saw when I turned the glove inside out to do the repairs.  As I also had been able to find a scrap of the original dye lot, I was able to confirm that it matched the color of the inside of the gloves while the outside had muted and faded somewhat.

I’m not seriously distressed by this.  These mitts have had, what I would consider to be fairly hard wear, indoors and out and will have to be replaced next year.  Given that, I find the performance of both the yarn (Knitpicks merino, “Bare” fingering weight) and the dye (PAAS E.E. tablets) quite satisfactory.  YMMV, of course :)

And finally, after looking in every supermarket I found myself in, I found this:

My knit-buddy Opal, over at The Akamai Knitter recommended it a while ago and I’ve been searching for it ever since.  I’ll probably have it for lunch tomorrow and am looking forward to it.  Opal, I finally found it!

Last, but not least, I am closing down Knitting Chatters.  Thank you all for participating, it’s been great fun, but its time has come.  Blogging will, of course, continue as usual :)

Hope your weeks are all going well!

I can’t seem to get my head out of the dye pot these days :)  I suppose there could be worse things, eh?

This is Cedars of Lebanon; the whole story is over at The Dye Pot.  This is an over-dye of Knitpicks Palette (fingering weight) in the color “wood” (discontinued)...

...and I am completely enchanted with the results.

I have also started the next Do-it-Yourself hat in a pattern I have always loved.

It’s called “Slip Stitch Ovals” and can be found in Stanfield and Griffiths’ The Encyclopedia of Knitting - a book I have found to be endlessly useful.

The yarn is a batch of Cashmerino that I dyed ages ago and I’m remembering why I haven’t knit it up yet.  It is incredibly soft - as you would expect from something made of merino, microfibre and cashmere - but it has no body whatsoever.  I’m hoping that working it this way will make that less of an issue.  I have made hats out of Cashmerino before but remember deciding that it wasn’t quite the yarn for what I wanted to do :)

And, of course, I’m rushing this hat a bit because I can’t wait to get something going with the newly dyed yarn pictured above.  I’m such a sap for color!

Chatters is on for Saturday night - drop by if you’re in the virtual neighborhood!

I’ve been making hats for the cancer clinic where I get treatment and this week I finished one that was so much fun and so entertaining that I wanted to share it with you.  It’s similar to the Chunky Long Band Hat but I used worsted weight yarn on size 7 US (4.5 mm) needles.

I started by knitting this cable band to about 18” in length and then by picking up each cast on stitch and knitting it off (and binding off) with the corresponding stitch still on the needle.  This gave me the main body of the hat; it was about 4.5” wide.

Then I grabbed another color and picked up the stitches along one edge, adding a few as I went for ease as this would be the area where you would normally use ribbing.  I wanted it to be flexible enough to be able to pull on easily, but snug enough to hold well - you know, since I wasn’t actually doing ribbing :)

I did 5 rounds of that and it was enough - but when I do this again, I’ll probably add another couple of rounds just to be safe.

Then I picked up the stitches on the other edge.  I fudged these too, adding enough to get a multiple of 8 to simplify the decreasing mathematics (80 stitches total).  I worked about 5 rounds in stocking stitch and then did a bobble every 10th stitch.  On the next round, I started the decreases - K8, K2tog through the back loops.  This made an obvious decrease, but I thought it might be interesting as a design element, so I decided to use it, alternating a decrease round with a knit plain round - except that the stitch over the decrease I also knitted through the back.  I was tickled at how it came out - it seems to have a certain festive air :)

I finished it up at about 8 o’clock last night and you know what - it was a lot of fun.

This isn’t a difficult thing at all but you do have to like picking up stitches (I’ve got no problem with this) or at least not mind it much.  The construction means you can do pretty much anything your heart desires.  Make the center panel lace, do a baby cable rib for the base and maybe carry the baby cables to the top as well.  You can tailor the length of the center panel to the size of the head you’re knitting for and, if it pleases you, you can cast on provisionally and graft the edges together to complete the band.  Me, I don’t do grafting so I did a modified three-needle bind-off but you don’t even have to do that.  You could cast on and bind off in standard fashion and just sew the ends together.  For the bottom band you can, again, do anything you like - ribbing, garter stitch, seed, etc.  Switch to a funky, fluffy yarn and knit a band that looks like fur or fleece.  For the top, you do have to remember that you’re going to be decreasing and factor that into your considerations - but there’s still lots of latitude to play around.

The thing is, you can start with any gauge of yarn and any color you like, any stitch pattern(s) that please you and just fly by the seat of your pants.  In this case, I had bits of yarn I wanted to use up so what I wound up doing was only limited by how much of each color I had.  I really did make it up as I went along.

You can too :)

First off, two new additions have been made to The Dye Pot - Rusty Venture

(which you already know about) and a newer effort, Respighi’s Pines.

There’s one more dye job drying in the kitchen, and the possibility of yet another effort…maybe tomorrow?  Maybe next week…

I wanted to see what the Lion Wool was like to work with so I made another Owl Hat.  I usually work hats with the Magic Loop method, but this time I knit on a 16” circular.  It worked just fine, but man, did my hands complain about it!  I’ll probably be sticking with the Loop thingy from here on out.  It’s just a whole lot easier for me to manipulate :)

While the yarn felt a little rough to me in the ball, it turned out to be quite comfortable to knit with and the fabric created wasn’t uncomfortable on the skin.  The stitch definition was excellent…

...and it wasn’t the least bit splitty.  Because I have poor co-ordination and even poorer aim, I find most yarns to be splitty to one degree or another :)  This one surprised me.  One ball was more than enough to make the hat,  but this is a larger than usual ball - 85 grams/158 yards.  I have no idea how it will wear (will it pill or won’t it?) but in general, I was very pleased with it’s performance.  Oh, there was one knot in the ball. 

My only real sticking point is the price.  It’s not completely out there, running between about $4.50 and $5.00 a ball.  Given that, I’m not sure, were I planning a project - especially a substantial one, I wouldn’t go with a proven work horse like Cascade 220 which is about the same price-per-yard, but comes in more generous skeins (100 grams/220 yards) and many, many more colors. 

Chatters is on for this evening - come one, come all!

I’ve had a surprisingly productive couple of days which seem to have been spurred by something utterly ridiculous :)

Please totally disregard the incredibly disreputable sneakers in the above photo.  They need desperately to be replaced but until I can find a nearly identical pair (wide, comfortable toe, inch-thick sole) these will probably get worn until they fall apart.  Oh, and they also shouldn’t cast $60 or more…  It’s the laces to which I wish to draw your attention :) 

I was getting dressed the other day and there was another break in the original shoelace.  There have been a couple already and, lazy slob that I am, I just knotted the ends together and went on.  This time there wasn’t enough shoelace left to do that again and there were no spare laces around.  What?  And give up room for spare yarn?  Gracious, no! 

So I needed to come up with something and what I came up with was a crochet hook and some worsted weight cotton :)  I do have some white - quite a bit, in fact - but I thought the blue would be more fun and would go with my jeans, besides.  Using the old lace as a guide, I just crocheted a chain to the proper length, laced up the sneakers and bob’s your uncle!  Didn’t take any time, solved my problem and added a bit of amusing funk to what’s left of my sneakers :)  It also occurred to me that you could make several pairs of laces in different colors if you were so inclined…

This seemed to set off an urge to do some real work so on Sunday, I got out my aunt’s mitts.  I’ve been doing a little on them (a pattern repeat) every day - and that’s usually as much as my hands can take of making bobbles with fingering weight yarn on size 1 US (2.25 mm) needles.  And yet, once I got into the rhythm of things, I just kept going.  In fact I got about halfway through the thumb gusset before my hands crapped out.

I finished them yesterday, but not before the yarn totally messed with my head.  I got within about six rounds of finishing and came to the end of the first ball of yarn.  You may recall that the mitts were being made with sock yarn that I had dyed - yarn that came in the standard 50 gram balls.  So I went to the basket in which I usually keep current projects (and their necessary components) to get the second ball.

Not there.

I looked everywhere, in every bag, box, closet and cabinet - including re-checking the basket at least three times.  Eventually, I decided that since I had dyed this yarn at my father’s house, I must have lost that second ball somewhere between his place and mine.  With much pissing and moaning and gnashing of teeth, I took some Peer Gynt DK weight which was a very similar color, and peeled two plies off about 8 yards of the stuff.  This left three plies which was roughly equivalent to fingering weight; I spliced it in and went back to work.  I brought the mitt out to the kitchen so I could look at the color junction in natural light.  It was essentially undetectable; the new yarn was just a hair darker and a hair redder than the old, but I’m probably the only one who would notice and probably only then because I dyed them both.

Going back into the living room, I had been thinking about another project I could probably finish up once I was done with the mitts and for which I needed a specific ball of heathered blue yarn.  I knew I had seen that very yarn earlier in the day, so I checked the basket for it.  Care to guess what I found?  Yup - the second ball of sock yarn.  I swear it was laughing at me…  Even so, I was more than glad to rip out the substitute and to be able to finish up with the real deal.

These were based on the Dana Victoria mitts and I made a couple of modifications to size them down.  I will add those modifications to the pattern.  I’m very pleased with how they came out and I hope my aunt will enjoy them.

Okay, the mitts were complete, but I wasn’t ready to stop knitting, so the second project moved up in the queue.  But I still had to find that blasted blue yarn.  Again, I looked everywhere - only this time I knew it was around because I had seen it earlier in the day, when I was chasing the second ball of sock yarn.  It was maddening, but eventually I located it in a bag that was living in an unusual place.  Yes, it was snickering at me too :)

But I did get these done…

...and lovely and toasty they are too :)  My feet were cold yesterday and when I finished weaving the ends in on these puppies and put them on, I swear I could feel my toes smile!  These are the Endless Knot socks.  I did a matching pair (instead of a yin/yang pair) this time and used the knot color for the heels and toes.

They’ll go nicely with my new shoelaces :)